She woke hours later. The trees outside her window were in a gray, smokey light. Her father was out in the living room talking silly with Christopher, who was laughing so hard he sounded like he might pass out. The house smelled like frying chicken and roast potatoes. Allie sat up and rubbed her eyes and began to cry, hoping to God she was just late and had only taken on a morning bug, that her mother and father had fought an overboard fight they now regretted, that the four of them would be driving down to Mississippi in a month to a gorgeous place among all those cypress trees where Leo could send her letters, if he truly cared to. Gosh, he could even visit.

16

The sun showed itself for the first time all week on Wednesday afternoon. It shone through in patches at first, but soon the sky opened up and the sun’s heat was everywhere. Tom stood spread-legged, balancing himself on the top plate of the north wall while Chick straddled the ridge pole of the roof skeleton fifteen feet or so above the plywood platform of the second floor. Leo stood there and his job was to pull the twelve-foot rafters up one at a time to Tom, who was taking them real slow. He made sure his feet stayed firm on the plate, then he lowered the notched end of the rafter behind him out over the ground two stories below so he could feed the other end to Chick up on the ridge. Leo looked up at Chick but that’s where the sun was, just over Chick’s left shoulder. Leo looked back down, blinking green.

It was slow going. Chick had cussed himself for lending out his ladders and he made a point of telling Leo this wasn’t the best way to lay out rafters, ball-hugging an inch-and-a-half-wide ridge pole, trying to nail from up there too. But he was doing it. It was just taking a while, maybe five to eight minutes a rafter.